Reagan Aides Scored in Study of Offshore Oil

Government documents made public Wednesday raised new concerns about oil drilling off the California coast and suggested that the Ronald Reagan Administration deliberately played down the possibility that offshore drilling could have a severe environmental impact.

Among the reports were memorandums drafted by two federal agencies warning that the Interior Department, in reviewing a planned lease sale involving tracts off the coast of Northern California, seriously underestimated the possibility of a catastrophic oil spill.

The previously unreleased documents, obtained by Rep. Mel Levine (D-Santa Monica), made clear that concern among federal agencies about offshore drilling is more wide-ranging than previously believed.

They also show that a senior Interior Department official sought to muffle the critics by drafting a memorandum warning that an agency report about environmental hazards associated with drilling “could prove very damaging to this lease sale.”

Levine and other California legislators, stepping up their anti-drilling campaign in the wake of the Alaska oil spill, characterized the documents as a “smoking gun” that proves that the Reagan Administration knew that the potential environmental risks of offshore drilling were more serious than the Interior Department had acknowledged.

They accused Reagan appointees of seeking to “whitewash” the dissent and urged the Bush Administration to cancel its plans for drilling off the California coast.

“President Bush should get this monkey off his back and off the back of the people of California,” said Sen. Alan Cranston (D-Calif.).

Bush has appointed a presidential task force, chaired by Interior Secretary Manuel Lujan Jr., to examine the potential environmental impact of drilling in the Northern California offshore tracts included in Lease Sale 91 and in another area off Southern California known as Lease Sale 95.

In a letter to Bush, the California legislators suggested that the task force would be the appropriate forum for reviewing the new environmental concerns. But they urged that its mandate be widened to include another area, Lease Sale 119 off Central California, and argued that the hazards of oil drilling off Northern California were now so evident that the planned lease sale there should be canceled.

Other California Legislators

In addition to Levine and Cranston, California legislators who signed the letter included Reps. Douglas H. Bosco (D-Occidental), Barbara Boxer (D-Greenbrae), Bill Lowery (R-San Diego), Leon E. Panetta (D-Monterrey) and Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco).

The newly released memorandums were written last year by the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration in response to a draft assessment by an Interior Department agency of the environmental impact of drilling in the Northern California tracts.

The release of the documents adds to the record of inter-agency criticism of Lease Sale 91. Last year, the Fish and Wildlife Service issued a grim assessment accusing the Reagan Administration of playing down the environmental dangers posed by oil drilling in the region.

That report was later repudiated as unauthorized by Fish and Wildlife Director Frank Dunkle, even though he had signed the original report. By contrast, officials at EPA and NOAA said Wednesday that their agencies were sticking by their comments.

Both documents, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, suggested that Interior’s Mineral Management Service appeared to have underestimated the likelihood that oil spills might occur and the damage they would cause to marine life and other coastal resources.

The California legislators said that such warnings should be taken particularly seriously in light of the lessons learned by the recent oil spill in Alaska’s Prince William Sound.

“The federal government refused to plan for a worst case spill scenario in Alaska, and the result is one of the nation’s worst environmental disasters,” Levine said. “We cannot allow this to occur in California.”

The NOAA report, which officials said represented official department policy, charged that the statistical model used by the Mineral Management Service to assess the risk of an oil spill “may underestimate the occurrence of spills” and the time it would take the oil to reach land.

It said that the MMS study overlooked the likely impact of an oil spill on estuaries and wetlands and that it “downplays the risk and impacts that an oil spill could have on commercial fishing.”

The EPA memorandum, drafted by the California regional office, warned that the agency’s “overriding concern” was that the MMS draft report “tends to downplay the risks and environmental effects associated with a possible oil spill.”

The language contained in the EPA memorandum was more vivid than that used by the agency’s director of federal activity, Richard E. Sanderson, in his official report reviewing the MMS document. Sanderson’s report, however, voiced similar concerns about the hazards of oil spills.

On Wednesday, Sanderson and officials in the agency’s California office indicated that they stood by the spirit of both documents, which characterized Lease Sale 91 as “environmentally objectionable.”

The other newly released document, a memorandum from then-Assistant Interior Secretary Steven Briles to another assistant secretary, Bill Horn, was strongly critical of a Fish and Wildlife Service report that also warned of environmental risks from offshore drilling.

Among other recommendations, the Fish and Wildlife report proposed that drilling be delayed “to give the public time to implement energy conservation measures . . . and reduce the need for a lease sale.”

The proposed delay, Briles warned, “conflicts with departmental policy and the Minerals Management Service mandate.”